Equity

  The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy draws on the experiences of the Tamilnadu Women’s Collective (WC), a state-level federation of women’s groups from 1,500 villages, in the context where communities all around the world are struggling to find ways to cope with changes affecting food and water security because of the phenomenon of climate change.

The report argues that many a times, new food and water security policies at the national and international level tend to be narrow, look at each of these issues in isolation and  undermine food and water security strategies adopted by individuals and households from marginal groups. Adaptation strategies to address food security focus almost exclusively on increasing agricultural production, while ignoring health and cultural aspects of the food being produced, and the role of agriculture as a means for rural viability.

 The crisis has ballooned with economic liberalization that has removed agricultural subsidies and opened Indian agriculture to the global market. Small farmers are often trapped in a cycle of insurmountable debt, leading many to take their lives out of sheer desperation. 

Main highlights in this update:

• NREGA implementation in State not satisfactory: The report card on implementation of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is a mix bag for Assam, with at least 62 per cent households being provided employment under the flagship schemes, while ombudsman has not been constituted for any district and State fund.

  The law pertaining to coastal spaces – the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) Notification, 1991 specifically decides what people can and cannot do on the coastal stretches of the country.

It is a part of the Global Scaling Up Rural Sanitation project of the Water and Sanitation Programme, World Bank and focuses on learning how to combine the approaches of Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), behavior change communications, and social marketing of sanitation to generate sanitation demand and strengthen the supply of sanitation products and services at scale, leading to improved health for people in rural areas. This is one in a series of knowledge products designed to showcase project findings, assessments and lessons learned in the project.

Over the last few years, the concept of open-defecation free communities has emerged as one of the building blocks toward achieving total sanitation. The term ‘access’ is widely used to capture increase in sanitation usage. However, a clean environment is a public good. Hence, there was a need to achieve total sanitation at the community level to realize public health benefits. This has led policy makers and practitioners to adopt strategies that achieve community-wide total sanitation status, which includes the community becoming open-defecation free, and adopting safe hygiene and environmental sanitation practices.

It covers varying groundwater scenarios in the country including the highly developed metros, the hilly region, the coastal cities, the cities tapping unconsolidated and hard rock aquifers. The report briefly describes the administrative set up, status of water supply and demand, groundwater scenario, feasibility of rainwater harvesting and groundwater development strategy.

It is an updated version of an earlier report on “Groundwater in urban environment in India” (2000). Since then, groundwater regime, urban demography and water demand have changed enormously. This report will form a scientific base for an in-depth understanding of urban groundwater system including aquifer geometry, water level behavior and groundwater quality. The possibility of artificial recharge to rejuvenate the urban aquifers has also been discussed.

NREGA is being eulogized by many in the academic, development and policy arena as a “silver bullet” for eradicating rural poverty and unemployment, by way of generating demand for productive labour force in villages and private incentives for management of common property resources.

The practice continues in the country in spite of efforts of several people, implementation of government schemes such as the National Scheme for Liberation and Rehabilitation of Scavengers since 1992 and Self Employment Scheme

The current research analysis by International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in cooperation with ICAR Resear